This chapter reconstructs how Tagore and Nag’s agenda for a global humanism, inspired by the template of Greater India, was put to the test at Visva-Bharati university, a space closely monitored by the colonial authorities as a potential breeding ground for sedition. Tagore’s peculiar blend of Orientalism and internationalism resonated with an international group of intellectuals, including Romain Rolland, Carlo Formichi, Sylvain Lévi and Yone Noguchi, but ultimately lost traction amidst the ideological turmoil and political developments that marked the 1920s and 30s. As Tagore’s controversial visit to Fascist Italy painfully revealed, a vision of world order premised on the cooperation of cultural ambassadors from the East and West sharing the same humanist ideals, became increasingly untenable. Furthermore, the Indian exceptionalism and cultural essentialism that energized Tagore’s vision turned out to be unpalatable for figures such as Lévi, who supported the GIS but dismissed any notion of an Eastern mission to ‘redeem the West’. Japan’s geopolitical ascendency altered the East for good and shattered the dream of a united Asian front inspired by the legacies of ‘Greater India’.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.